Women step up Chechen battles

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A police officer guards a main entrance to the Volgograd railway station hit by an explosion, in Volgograd, Russia, Sunday, Dec. 29, 2013. More then a dozen people were killed and scores were wounded Sunday by a female suicide bomber at a railway station in southern Russia, officials said, heightening concern about terrorism ahead of February's Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

STATION SLAUGHTER: Smoke pours from a window of the Volgograd railway station yesterday after a suicide bomber’s blast left at least 15 dead. The attack on the station heightens fears of a terrorist attack during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia in February.

Russia’s bloody battles with Chechen separatists go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but have taken on a terrifying new face in the 21st century, experts tell the Herald.

Witnesses reportedly saw a woman detonate a shrapnel-laden body bomb yesterday at a train station in Volgograd, the industrial city formerly known as Stalingrad. Experts say the bombing follows the pattern of other recent Chechen attacks.

Political science professor James Warhola of the University of Maine said the woman was likely what the Russians have taken to calling a “Black Widow,” the self-sacrificing wife of a Chechen rebel killed for the cause of self-government. The Chechens have a different name, he said: “Allah’s Angels.”

“They’ve killed enough of their men that now their women are coming after you,” said national security analyst Edward Turzanski. “The goal is an independent republic … to get the Russians to say that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze and give up on Chechnya and let them go their own way.”

Warhola said one reason Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t simply cut his losses in Chechnya is because critical gas and oil pipelines run straight through there to fuel depots on the Black Sea coast.

Yesterday’s terrorist attack hit one train station, but the Chechens are “definitely” looking at the big picture, Warhola said.

Three people died Friday when a car filled with explosives blew up near a traffic police station in the city of Pyatigorsk, also in the North Caucasus. Two explosions were reported yesterday near a grocery store in the Dagestani city of Derbent; five people were injured.